Spare me the baby bores

We seem, suddenly and without warning, to be in the middle of a cultural baby boom.

The difference between a cultural baby boom and an actual baby boom is that for a cultural baby boom you don't need any babies - only the idea of a baby. It might be that there is an actual baby boom afoot as well, but I wouldn't know about that. I live high up, in a dangerous part of town, where actual babies can't reach. Nothing, however, can protect me from the cultural idea of "baby", which is everywhere.

I open my newspapers and I read of "Baby Hunger", a condition which sounds like a species of cannibalism and which is said to afflict high-flying, ravenous career women of a certain age, with blood on their teeth. I risk the streets, taking care there are no prams about, and I come upon posters of Hugh Grant looking alarmed to find a baby in his arms. Where has it come from, this baby? Is it raining babies now?

As fast as career women eat them, are there new babies being made on high? Rather than have one dropped on me, I return home and turn on the television.

More babies. Dramas about women stealing babies that aren't theirs. Documentaries about couples who can't have babies, who must have babies, who sell everything they own to pay for babies. News stories telling of disabled lesbians who want babies engineered to have the same disabilities they have; of mothers seeking surgery to remove all trace of where baby's been, pulling back this, tightening that - babies without the pain, babies without pregnancy, babies without their faculties. Phantom babies.

And then the soap operas, at the centre of the plot of every one of which at present is a baby, sometimes an actual baby played by an actual baby actor - for there is abundant work for babies on television today and being a baby offers excellent career prospects - but mainly the promise or the delusion of a baby.

If the soaps are any sort of reflection of the state we're in, then babies are the only subject on our minds. What is more, it isn't only the women who are hooked on the concept of baby - hungering for babies they haven't had, coveting babies they can't have, tea-leafing babies that belong to someone else - the men are even worse.

The hardest man in EastEnders turns to jelly when he is allowed five minutes in the company of the baby he sired, but didn't know he sired, on a woman who would rather kill him than admit the baby's his. "Eyh!'' he croons. "Eyyyh!" Which is hard-man talk for, "Hush, my lovely."

Coronation Street has a little pond-life person at his wits' end because he doesn't know whether his baby is indeed his or the doctor's who treated him for infertility. Rather than see his baby go to another man, the doctor has left the series. Curly, whoever Curly is, has chosen to ignore the warnings of Naomi Wolf and stay at home to nurse his baby - assuming it is his baby and not the pond-life person's (a twist the makers of Coronation Street have not yet thought of) - instead of running Sainsbury's.

Baby hunger is not an adequate description of this. It is baby hysteria. Baby delirium. Baby psychosis.

I can't pretend I know absolutely nothing of it myself. Though I performed hopelessly as the father of an actual baby when I had my chance, I now behave very strangely when someone else's baby is wheeled through my defences. I become what psychologists call cataleptic - I stare and stare, as though I have seen a ghost, lose all control of my muscles, and then collapse like a marionette whose strings are cut.

I might, in fact, be seeing ghosts - a guilt-induced illusion of the baby I fathered badly, or a nostalgic illusion of my own babyhood, which I probably enjoyed too much.

However you explain it, to have me and a baby in the same room makes life intolerably tedious for everybody else. But then that's the drawback with actual babies socially: an actual baby is a black hole, sucking all attention its way, emptying conversation of all variety. If nature means us to have babies, then nature means us to be morons. The idea of a baby has always been more interesting than the actuality. For the Romantics, a baby represented poetic inspiration. Wordsworth's blessed infant babe trails clouds of glory, having recently bathed in the refulgence of God. Blake's baby leaps bravely into the world and becomes a little politician only because his parents - too concerned with their own fears - don't know how to make him feel at home. Victorian Calvinism reversed all this, understanding the baby as a naturally vicious creature who had to have everything childlike beaten out of him.

You could say that every age gets the baby it deserves. Ironic materialists ourselves - ironic so long as we have everything we want - we seek a baby in our own image, easy to come by, philosophically neither good nor bad, looking as photogenic on the breast as he did in the womb, when his mother bared her swollen fecundity for all to marvel at on the cover of Vanity Fair.

In short, we want a fashion accessory. For the yummy-mummy, a de-babied baby, cut out of the abdomen like a pearl from its shell, a tot to tote, as chic on the arm as a Gucci bag. Eyyyh! Gucci-gucci-goo.

? Howard Jacobson's new novel Who's Sorry Now? is published by Jonathan Cape.